Arctic

In honor of the snow falling out my window looking onto Madison Avenue, here's my post professing my love, and hopefully soon my concert ticket dollars, to The Arctic Monkeys. This band is exciting me about music all over again.

One of the challenges of music today is filtering out the crap from the truly special. I see more next "it" band names than I can possibly listen to if I tried 24/7. So forgive me if I'm behind the times on this one. But have you heard the Arctic Monkeys album? No, not the new one. I mean the one that came out in January 2006: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not. They are a healthy mix of Oasis and The Strokes with lyrics I thought only Mike Skinner (The Streets) wrote.

I read all about the buzz including the British music magazine NME ranking it at No. 5 on a recent list of the greatest British albums EVER and the album selling over 360,000 copies in its first week making it the fastest-selling debut album in British history. The praise even carried over here to the States when The New York Times called the album "a modern classic". And for some reason, I still didn't make an effort. Damn, I should have known.

So I missed the boat. But when the new album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, comes out in April 2007 I'll be first in line. Hopefully not in the snow on Madison Avenue though.